The Crysis hype hadn’t quite ended with SSAO, I’m sure there were a few papers on dynamic light shafts before but this particularly version, which is mathematically wrong, looks pretty good too even thought it’s basically a radial blur around the light source as a postprocessing effect. Anyway, it’s a relatively new technique and it’ll take a while before I get it to look right (the rays are kind of soft). Some changes to the engine: Separated the main configuration file into two, the other for postprocesses. You can now choose objects to cast shadows.

Lately I decided to recode my game “engine”, which is more of a graphics/physics sandbox, into a proper expandable game engine with organized classes and files, the way it’s meant to be done. Every map and entity has a property file which assigns the mesh and the material. The map file contains extra attributes such as object position, rotation, lighting…etc. This way, anyone could easily integrate their custom contents in the engine without opening up Visual Studios. In fact this allows integrating with my mapeditor possible and I’ll definitely be making one someday.

I made a few changes to the shaders, improved SSAO, made the game more scalable and removed the cheap lens ghosting filter. There’s a new minigame included too: Clear out every object in the map with your companion psy-cube! I think there’s enought screenshots of my cafeteria so I’ll save it.

For two years this was an ambitious project for a decent game engine, with latest generation graphics, networking, physics and proper gameplay, but it was quickly realised that a one man project is very very difficult, if not impossible. As the project develops, it’s looking a lot more like a shader testing platform then a would be tech-demo, no animation, no sounds, and definitely, no photo-realistic graphics. Perhaps in three to five years we’ll be able to have CG quality in real-time, but meanwhile, let’s just get down on paper and get some game done.

Meanwhile, I’m researching on giving my game visual style a 3D cartoon look, but using advance shader techniques similar to realism rendering. Hopefully, it wouldn’t turn out to look like realistic animating plasticine. (Hey, maybe it’ll be great!)

Of course, I’ll still be working on Project Declension with one goal in mind: Photo-realism at 60fps. Who knows what upcomming graphical theories might there be. For now, it’ll take a well deserved rest.

After weeks of developing my Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) to no avail, I had to give it up. The best my shader could come close to compare is an very expensive noise filter, which does nothing the name says so. (I’m using the crysis method, using the zbuffer and normals) Then one of the “shader master” guy at the Irrlicht forum recommend me to do a simple depth comparison instead. In the next half hour, my code bought darkness to the cafeteria scene! YAY!

 The depth SSAO is simply great looking and efficient. It’s a lot faster, since I do not have multiple material rendering support (MRT), I don’t have to render my scene again for the normals. It doesn’t suffer from the jittering noise crysis method would have but I still applied a gaussian blur for realism. The results are very impressive, adding darkening to objects close to each other for the ambient occlusion and in turn realism.

Another thing I tweaked is to update the physics according to the time, rather than being framerate dependent. It worked smooth as butter with significantally improved FPS. However there seem to be a bug which prevents me from adding too much props to the scene by crashing the physics. Perhaps the delta time could not keep up with the actual timer? No idea.

 One problem that my HDR has till today is flickering lights due to the scene luminance sampling. It was too precise. I had the idea of blurring it, which it should have been, when I developed the blurring for my SSAO. It’s good it’s fixed now and there’s a smooth light transition between brighter and dimmer areas. I made the scene blue/whitish unless you’re close to a bright light source. It’s really just a blue shift.

Snippets, the usual. About the larger ones, they’re the paragraph breakers.

There were not much progress being made in the graphics side since my screen space ambient occlusion, which I can’t seem to get it to work in my engine. Of course, there’s a few new post-worthy items to mention like my new ghosting effect and my new lightmapped scene. I definitely do not want to use cheap lens so I had the flares made minimum.

I have tried lots of free lightmappers but none of them has what I really want - control of texcoords. It is difficult to assign materials or textures as everything gets messed up with each export. Anyway I managed to get one done fairly neat, but I has to drop the normalmap because there were no texcoord for it. Notice shadows dramatically improves realism, even thought I have no indirect lighting present. Perhaps I’m going to bake radiosity in my lightmaps as well.

I’m sure once I gotten hold of 3DSmax I could make use of the lightmapping features, or find a great lightmapper tool which provides the texcoords I need. Right now, I’m trying to use code to create a 2 texcoord mesh and assigning the respective textures.

Non-lightmapped:

It’s been a month and I’d like to keep you updated on what I’ve done, even it’s yet to be completed. Honestly, I’ve forgotten which visual effect I’ve improved, which code optimized, or where I’m heading as I type. But that won’t be particularly entertaining. So, firstly about my blinn lighting, I added a diffuse cubemap over my previous reflecting environment map for the extra effects, can’t say it improves realism since my cubemap consists a texture mere for six faces. The ambient light formula is modified for a stronger coloring, which makes a less easier to overlook.

I’ve been busy putting more bells on my HDR for the little extra jingle, but it turns out only to weight down my pretty frames per second. Shadows are always an advance topic and yes, I do agree getting a dynamic, pleasant looking, accurate and devoid of aliasing is almost un-do-able. So, I won’t work on getting it in my game till someone come up a really great theory. OK, that’s my excuse. Still I’m looking for ways to do it and one method that sounds promising is to project my lightmap onto my static mesh. Even the most basic shadowing methods proves to be useful as I can bake accurate shadows and radiosity into it. The problem is to project it and I haven’t got one idea how to do so.

Now, if you’re hoping for a big expansive update, here I proudly introduce my Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)! Made popular recently by the game with worst graphics: Crysis. Well, before you argue about that outrageously claimed opinion, do take consider of the FPS with all graphical settings maxed and you’ll realise you can’t do 60fps at 1280×1024. Alright…it’s definitely for the next-gen GPUs. This new technology definitely evoke tech-buzz as it’s ambient occlusion in realtime, and since it’s a postprocessing effect, the complexity of the scene isn’t judged. However, it’s still not something to be tried at home with a SM2.0 or lower-end graphics card. Here’s a screenshot of my raw SSAO output WITHOUT depth comparation, only the normals. There’s something wrong with my code and I’m working very hard on it.

It wouldn’t be exciting without my latest map scene, would it?

Oh and there’s something I stumbled across when I was tweaking my lighting shader - fake subsurface scattering. Here’s a shot and it’s up to your to judge.

That’s probably all of Janurary and another month of holiday cheer, although there’s nothing cheerful to be about when school starts late April and you don’t find games really interesting. Nope, not that I’m getting old. It’s just that I played too much first person shooters, which are too easy for an old dog (NOT literally!). Crysis, bioshock, orangebox…there’re just too much shooters and just by looking their graphics makes me depressed. Recently, I got this gift: Dreamfall: The Longest Journey thought Steam, which appears dated for a 2006’s graphics. I don’t usually stray from action FPS but I guess an adventure game is a good balance considering the last one I played one was three years ago. So the first thing I notice: Static lighting….radiosity lightmapping….all the graphical technical bits…but at least the world looks pretty and the cutscenes could have been CG. It plays like a mule but I got used to the controls eventually, but what I really wanted to point out in this whole paragraph was that I realised a FPS can’t convey a story as good as a third-person adventure game, which has a great story to tell. Strangely, I don’t find Bioshock’s storyline epic, perhaps the world isn’t “epic” enough. Now I’m questioning myself whether I’ve got Claustrophobia.

It has been a week since the struck of the new year, not that exciting to me really. I’ve been working my HDR (my dynamic bloom) again and tweaked it to look a little nicer, and a lot faster. The problem is that trading 100fps for some lighting effects seems trivial, but just look at the glinting realism of those bright bits. I could have optimized the postprocess quite a lot only if my graphics library supports rendering to multiple RTTs.  Anyway, there’s really no easy way out and I’ll see that I get a ring buffer done, hopefully.

  It’s my HDR at it’s very best, an afternoon event!

 I had some textures re-toned to blend in with the rest and made several new normalmaps for my scene. The cafeteria model is now enhanced with shiny, fancy design, with lots of objects added to it. I have made a dynamic LCD frames per second counter (a basic box) which actually does updates the current rendered frames every second, displaying digits exactly like what you’ll see in a everyday digital watch/clock. It could double as a clock too, displaying your computer time of course! Yes, I’ll do that soon and perhaps I’ll have the outdoor environment updated accordingly as well. Right now, there’s a DirectX bug (most likely my code) that prevents it from updating, and loading a random time-of-day whenever I run my app.

2 dawn/dusk shots. Here’s my new light shader with alpha transparency. Look at the plants.

This time, my lights are a little more complex, that’s why it’ll have to use Shader Model 3 for more lights support - yep, the culprit being the 2 dot product lights with color matching the outdoor environment hemisphere and ambient, placed at both ends of the map opposite of each other. It’s added to simulate reflection/bounces of light into the nooks and cranny of the scene. Having a single light is just unreal. And speaking of lighting reflections, I had looked into Precomputed Radiance Transfer to address my fake, resource munching (SM3 hardware) lighting plus lack of shadows. Which gives a great cue of depth, greatly improving graphics. Unfortunately, it only allow static objects to be used on, and it’s limited to slow, low frequency lights. Still, there’s no general way to achieve dynamic, visually correct global illumination. Radiosity and PRT is definitely not used in dynamic scenes, and indoors. Perhaps I’ll be using dynamic ambient occlusion……  I know Sm2 line of video cards don’t stand a chance against these rude, number crunching shaders but it’s always a challenge to use 64 lines of instructions, unless I had to do multi-pass.

Featuring my LCD counter!

Anyway, global illumination (GI) would seriously improve the graphics of any scene. It is just (quite) physics-ally correct, simulating each bounces of light photons onto different surfaces, till your CPU takes infinite time to calculate every sample of it. There’s the added bonus of true soft shadows with all shades of umbra! It’s all too sweet to get it all working realtime. Yes, it possible, since it’s precomputed, and the only person that has to suffer the wait are the developers. Nah, I’ll get some artist to do it, or even make you run the calculation yourself. Don’t worry, I might not use PRT.

Now this is a good one I forgot to mention. It’s suppost to be blueshift, a natural phenomenal that’s caused by our eyes reacting to low light conditions. Of course, in my game, I’ve never taken laws of physics into consideration. Here’s my camera blueshift in extreme lighting conditions!

Currently, I’m trying to get my pixel motion blur (or true camera motion blur) into my game. All of these, HDR and pixelMB requires sampling 2 frames of my game, the current and the previous. That’s not a problem with my ring buffer.

Lastly, I’d like to say I haven’t posted any updates for quite a long while, so excuse my lengthy story. In fact, this would be my standard in the rest of my posts from now on.

A final night shot, a true starmap.

What’s different between bloom and this postprocessing shader, you’ll have to see it during realtime. It adjusts scene brightness according to the scene average luminance, so there won’t be overexposure even up close to a light source. I didn’t use HDR textures so colors isn’t that strong…..for now, till IrrlichtCP supports HDR cubemaps and textures. I’ll find a way for a smooth transistion of brightness levels, something like eye adaption. Also, I fixed the texel alignment by addition of a guess of number. Blooming is pretty now.

 OK, check these out now. The first one shows a light source affecting walls and stuff from a dark area. When the camera moves closer, the light automatically adjusts itself to a lower brightness. Well, that’s what HDR (perhaps fake HDR for now) should look like.

Finally, I managed to get my real bloom post-processing done, working and looking good. Of course, I had been especially careful not to overexpose, or blur areas too much. Lots of thanks to the Irrlicht community for helping me and criticizing those atrocious screenshots. For this bloom, I downsampled to 1/4 my original resolution and added gaussian blur (2pass X and Y), bright-filter (filter out those bright areas), then tonemap (combine the original with the bloomed, with luminance). BTW, I had upped the resolution of my screenshots to 1280×1024 avoiding heavy aliasing.

Aside from my shaders programming, which refused to work, I went on to create some textures which might be useful if I’m going to create another map. Making the textures seamless is a tough job without Photoshop, but Fireworks turns out to be fine, resulting in lots of trial and errors but the result is quite acceptable. Anyway, they’re in 1024×1024 which should be sufficient to apply to tight areas without repeating the textures. They’re made to suit my shader, which has a colormap, glossmap, normalmap, dirtmap, envmap… Generally, you’ll be needing the colormap, specularmap, the normalmap and heightmaps for some instances (parallaxmapping) so I’ve had them included. The color and gloss map are in one .png, glossmap as alpha.

To save space, I’ve got the screenshots posted in the Irrlicht forum so you can view them all enlarged at one go: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=138927

 Here’s the link to download, there’s 2 packs I made at time of writing.

Pack1: http://www.orandysoftware.com/user_files/decmap1_tex.zip

Pack2: http://www.orandysoftware.com/user_files/decmap2_tex.zip

They’re free to use in any projects and you can edit them in any way you like. If you would like to give credits, a name/link to my site would be just fine. Thanks.

I’ve recently looked at hlsl reflections and they are easy, simply using a cubemap, transform it into position so it’ll look like world reflections but instead of reflection, I had it multiplied with ambiance light to produce average GI. It could be more dynamic, but right now the library doesn’t supports cubemaps, so only a single texture was used in the scene. The results are more or less the same.

 You’ll be able to see some faked reflections on the top wall coverings, celling design, the gloved arms, floor and the table. I had made the amount of reflectivity easily changeable. Apparently, lighter areas would reflect more then the darker ones.

The graphics are still bugged and doesn’t reflect the final one, nevertheless, it’s looking well. I had thought of a unique gameplay to develop rather than the common shooters you’ll see anywhere, and I’ll be keeping it low.

I’ve been looking in HDR postprocessing and softshadows recently, and impressed by the Crysis engine. It’s good I found some articles on the shadows, as depth map is especially useful for a lot of situations. Implementing it to my engine would be difficult, at the moment. For HDR, the library lack some needed texture features, which is bad. Anyway, I reworked my bloom (more samples + gaussian blur), which softens the scene (and shadow) without overexposing it. I’ve enabled stencil shadow on some objects and not the main map as, yet again, the library’s shadow will be corrupted. Here’s some snippets.

Finally, a great looking semi-working lighting shader for my game, in HLSL. It has some common functions like the ambiance light, diffuse color, surface color and specular color, together with normalmap for the bumpy effects, glossmaps for the different levels of shininess, 3 levels of light attenuation and a cubemap for global illumination. The problem now is with the vertex shader, which dosn’t display correct lighting on meshes when they rotate to other angles.

 Check out the shader in my engine, however no GI as the graphic library doesn’t support cubemaps yet. The ambiance lighting follows the skycolor, which is updated realtime. One’s during dusk and other during night, and they probably look better outdoors.

Textures I made complete with gloss and normal map. I had them made seamless as well.

Just to savesome posting space, here’s some darker screens.

Finally an update worth posting after weeks of idleness because of exams and working on a shader language, HLSL which I’ll be using for project declension. I have decided not to work on GLSL anymore as my current PC graphics chip (incredibly a Intel G965 chipset) doesn’t have the needed OpenGL support. Coding blindly isn’t anywhere exciting and I have to sent a executable to another PC to test, every time I debug, which occurs often.

Even thought it isn’t cross-platform, HLSL is easily convertible to GLSL.

Anyway, here’s two great snippets in HLSL, one with bloom postprocessing and the other none. The cube is a normalmap shader with specular reflection and light attenuation, great stuff. The red elephant, a phong lighting and the other is a glittering glossy plastic. Tangents are built within the shader, which is good as I can use animated meshes.

Some major improvements to the player camera. Now, the weapons follows the shifts of the camera rotation to make it more realistic. A torso and legs are also added. You’ll also put your weapon down if you are facing too close to the walls. I’m on the way of coding a zooming sequence so you’ll know where exactly you are aiming at.

Graphics textures are updated a bit, however there seem to be a major issue with the specular maps, they aren’t being used correctly. I’m suspecting it’s due to the graphics library I’m using well some upcoming updates should fix them, hopefully.

Some screenshots now. I had the light intensity tuned down as it looks unnaturally nice indoors.

This one is with the specular map only, no normalmap. I’m puzzled why they can’t work together.

Finally after a week of debugging, the water shader is working fine now. However, I am forced to run it in DX9 as there seem to be some glitches with GSGL. The weapon isn’t parallax mapped, nor is the map. I’m on the process of creating addition effects like motion blur to add to the image. Perhaps it’ll be long before everything would be working.

As Promised, this game screen-dump says it all. Parallax mapping on the tiles, crates and the weapon. A single texture was mapped to the whole level as there appears to be some bug in my code. Perhaps it’ll look nicer in realtime.

Also, I had more or less implemented a smooth out wasd control. Hey, a FPS!

These tiles are looking great.

You can see in my previous screenshots that certain part of my map are wrongly mapped to the designated textures, and some are not even mapped at all. Anyway, check out my latest updates: animated idle movement of the weapon and motion blur. I had recreated most of the map’s normal and specular maps to look nicer. I’ll be probably be including glass shader on my next update, for the void under the hand railings.

I’m quite impressed with the results, especially with the bloom shader, which improves the scene quality but a great deal. What you’re looking at right now isn’t completely close to realistic as the scene is too bright. I’ll be testing my volume shadow to lower the light intensity and, naturally, improve the graphics realism. Be staying around!

A little office cafeteria I modelled. The design is based on a section of F.E.A.R.’s cafeteria level, so yeah, I’m not getting too creative. Check out how my shader is doing in it.

I’ve fine tuned the lighting shader and switched on a great deal of bloom, here’s some great shots of my semi-cooked map.

After being suspended from the computer for almost a quarter of a month because of exams, I’ve manage to fix and run my new lighting shader, with greater addition updates. Enough said, check these poor models I’ve made, hopefully my textures and shaders ain’t that bad.

My brickwall texture. Nice one huh?

My overexposed map. Using bloom.

My color shader.

Right now, I’ve running into some problems with assigning texture layer in my maps to pass to the shader and hence, you can see that only single object like the cubes are diffuse, parallax and specular mapped. The map contains many materials and it is only diffuse mapped.

OK, enought of graphics, I’ve also managed to get my physics library running like a charm in my engine. Here’s a screenshot of many cubes in my map. Oh, pity, I’ve overwritten that sole image in my PC .

 BTW, I have “borrowed” the replica soldier’s model from the F.E.A.R and several textures for some quick tests. It’s probably the most intense shooter I’ve played to date so have a go at it some time.

Just to add on, I’m amazed someone did commented on my projects! Thanks for all your posts.

Finally after a month or so working like haywire, I managed to bring upper-tier graphics at a very low performance cost to my game engine. The shaders uses data encoded textures to easilly generate great looking models. What’s more, physics is also present to bring accurate feedbacks in the world.

Some eye candy:

(I’m too lazy to map the room thought)

The next level of our engine allows artists to easily manage the scene and arrange objects around, at the same time, create lights and shadows in a map. Currently, the code needs major tweaking before the physics and parallax mapping is supported.

Shaders have finally arrived to the engine! However, I won’t be using it until later. Another great feature is that now you can render your scene as a texture (look at the image, it may be only a cube, but sooner, a TV!). I’m not so sure what caused the extra bits on the bottom left to appear but I guess it to do with that new feature.

Nice fogging is added (the one is the image isn’t quite visible) so you don’t lag your system.

I’ve been playing around with parallax mapping and that explains the tiles and the over polished gun. I’ll have that fixed on my next screenshot :).

This latest screenshot showcases the filter technology made possible by the engine. Simply turn it on and you get improved graphics.

Great screenshot of my devmap1 ambient occlusion. I had the lightmaps burned into the textures. The light is releative to the direction of my skybox too, which I had it hidden.

Recent test model of a outdoor factory scene. Currently, some parts of my models are not properly lightmapped when I load them in game and I’m searching for a solution.

My mess-around of my version of the 3D FPS game engine. Begin a graphic artist as well, I managed to create a nice looking map and had the Glock 15 animated, loading with dynamic shadows. I had to find a way to reduce the shadow casting accuracy and quality as it is beginning to lag when I had the same scene loading in my another typical PC. Everything is coded in VB.NET, which is probably the worse code to use when it come to games.

Anyway enjoy this screenshot while I develop more interesting stuff…